Eric Akaoka's blog

3D motion capture has just reached a whole new level with Mova's Contour Reality Capture, demonstrated at the GDC 08 Conference.

Instead of using traditional infrared marker-based capture technology, Contour uses phosphorescent makeup and/or clothing dyes to pick up tens of thousands of points on a human face alone. This allows for an incredible amount of detail for deformable surfaces that is unprecedented.

A textile designer named Meixuan Chen has been experimenting with combing shape-changing materials into knitted fabric and incorporating LEDs to create unique lighting products that can interact with people. The technique can of course be generalized into a number of applications.

Wired has an article about a shape-shifting robot concept that consists of nano-scale robots that cling to each other in an ordered fashion. The prototypes that exist are on the inches-and-centimetres order, but the vision is very promising.

A group of researchers from Elliptic Labs has developed a touchless user interface that tracks hand movement through the air without the user having to wear any equipment.

Interestingly, Elliptic Labs states that the tech can easily be miniaturized for use in mobile devices. Will no-touch be the next multi-touch?

A company called Lite-On has shown off a concept for a mouse made of a clay-like substance that you can mold to fit your needs. This eliminates the current one-size-fits-all design challenge facing mouse engineers. It uses stick-on buttons that communicate via RFID.

The Moldable Mouse is not currently slated for commercial release.

PC World has an article about specialized printers that use inkjet-style technology to print out all sorts of things, from flavours to skin to circuitboards.